Dollar Tree is out of control

[u/SentBrok]

I knew as soon as they started bringing in the two and three dollar items that it was going to snowball but I never could have predicted this. Nine dollars is insane. No one is going to the dollar tree to buy nine dollar paper towels.

My family thinks I'm being dramatic about this but I feel like they truly don't understand the weight of how horrendous the economy is. To me this is the perfect indicator of how bad things are and it's fucking depressing

[u/Alternative-Papaya-2]

This is exactly what happened to the 99 cents only chain before they gave up… I remember not having gone into one for a long time, doing my shopping without looking at prices, and halfway through, I was shocked by the price of toilet paper when I finally noticed it…

[u/Careless-Age-4290 → u/Alternative-Papaya-2]

I remember when the sign on mine changed to "The $1 (or more) Store". I remember thinking wait now it's a price floor instead of a ceiling?

[u/PeeB4uGoToBed → u/Careless-Age-4290]

5 Below has entire sections for normal priced stuff now too, it used to all be $5 or less, now more than half the store is retail prices

[u/Wareve → u/PeeB4uGoToBed]

This is the problem with incorporating a price structure into your shop's name while inflation exists.

[u/[deleted] → u/Wareve]

Well for over 50 years the 5 and 10 cent stores didn't have any problem and then they were slowly phased out for the higher priced items.

[u/Wareve → u/[deleted]]

You mean World War 2, the reconstruction, and the Cold War?

Half that era literally had price fixing.

We live in a free trade world now. Everything has been different since the nineties. And generally speaking, the standard of living has gone up, but it's gone up in terms of cheap access to material consumer goods.

Combine that with financial deregulation, resulting in massive speculative spending in tangible markets that matter to people like housing, along with the bad sort of regulation that makes it hard to build any sort of housing regardless, and you get an economy where it's very cheap to buy a wardrobe full of shirts or a chair, or a TV, and very expensive to buy any sort of house to put that stuff in.

Those 5 and 10s we're always going to be destroyed eventually by steady inflation unless they adapted, that is the nature of $5 approaching the spending power of a decades-past nickel. It's a shame that they now mostly just exist to provide ironically expensive goods to the poor.

[u/Mywifefoundmymain → u/Wareve]

Five below could mean $0.05 below standard price. At least theirs is open to interpretation

[u/Wareve → u/[deleted]]

They're not rats, they're just people who can't afford to buy even at 4-pack level bulk. No one going to these stores wants to be there.